What Happened to the Grow Your Self Podcast? Here's a 2021 to 2023 Recap

Welcome back to the Grow youw Self podcast. Oh, my goodness, it is so good to say those words to you. It has been a minute, a hot minute. Actually, it's been a hot three years. This morning, as I was preparing to come into the studio to record these episodes, I was like, oh, man, it's been. It's been, you know, a year, two years since I've done a podcast episode. And then I did the math and I realized, no, Nicole, it has almost been three whole years. My goodness, how time flies. So I launched the Grow youw self podcast in 2020. Do you remember that year? A couple of, like, really significant, I don't know, world shifting events happened, one of which, I don't know, coronavirus. Have you heard of it? So. So that year I sat in my closet upstairs in my Illinois bedroom and recorded episode after episode of the Grow youw Self podcast. I did it while my four kids were at home and learning online, or not learning online. And it was wonderful, but it was also a lot. And so when we hit 2021, I took a step back and put focus on a couple of other things for gardenary and for our business. So this episode is to tell you the very good news that the podcast is officially back and we've graduated from my closet in Illinois to this fantastic studio here in Nashville, Tennessee. So what has happened since that time? What has transpired over the last three years? Well, over the next few minutes, I'm just going to give you a quick rundown of where I've been, what we've been doing, and what is coming your way with the podcast over the next few weeks, year and season. So let's go back to 2021. We were honestly still very much in quarantine in some ways in Illinois. My kids were still schooling at home. And that's actually when I had to take a step back from the podcast because all four kids were doing school all day at home throughout the almost the entirety of the spring of 2021. It was quite a lot. Gardenary kept growing during that time. We had some fantastic launches and tons of students coming through our programs. In fact, January of 2021 was a phenomenal time where we had over 600 students from around the country and across the world go through the Kitchen Garden Academy program with me. And it was amazing to see so many people going all in on the garden. I think that was a time where we had all had the wake up call of 2020. We had all gone through the summer of 2020, and for a lot of us. It was a little too late to get a garden going, but we're all kind of woken up to the idea of, like, we need a garden to survive this thing called life. And so it was winter of 2021, and the masses came to learn how to set up and grow a garden in the new year. It was phenomenal. I think I had 30,000 people register to come and join me for our plan, your 2021 garden workshop. That about 600 came through the Kitchen Garden Academy course with us. We had regional coaches from all over the US it was a phenomenal time and such an amazing moment for me to realize that the people's interest and desire to start gardening was just taking off and that, you know, the initial scare and quarantine of COVID wasn't the end of people's interest in gardening. It was, you know, even as people were getting to maybe go out and be out of their home more often, that they couldn't unsee that moment when. When food was in short supply, when we were all kind of in shock and fear for. For our safety, for our health, for our lives. And also we were all just stuck at home. And. And so that was amazing. And then we had another incredible group of garden consultants come through our gardenary training that spring as well. So very similar to what had happened with the Wake up for the Garden we saw, I continue to see a very similar awakening for careers. So so many people had been home, you know, to do their work, working from home, either they permanently or temporarily, and they got a little taste of time, freedom, you know what I'm talking about, where they actually got to be at home and cook a few homemade meals or, I don't know, turn some laundry. Who does that? Not me. But keep up with some things at home while they're working. And there was just this beginning of this shift of people seeing their career in a different light. Also, of course, some people getting laid off or, you know, having a forced change in career, but we saw so many new people interested in becoming gardenary consultants. And so that spring was an incredible time to serve those students and watch these people come from, you know, having a garden in their backyard to suddenly helping hundreds of people in their towns have gardens in their backyards as well. So that was the beginning of 2021, made it through the spring and the summer. I had some incredible growth in my Chicago garden, and I signed a book deal for my second book. So I had just released Kitchen garden revival in 2020, and I had a couple of ideas Couple of follow ups. Because Kitchen Garden Revival was a book that was, I would say, a little bit advanced. Like it jumps right to setting up a really fancy, beautiful, I think, amazing kitchen garden. And I, you know, in the middle of COVID when everything was shut down, I was kind of awakened to like, oh, like we need like a first step. Like, what if, what about the people who can't just jump to the fancy raised beds and trellises and a full backyard of garden? What about the people who just need something they can grow right away? So the book idea started first with Just Doing greens. I actually proposed to do a whole book just on growing salad, you know, my passion about growing salad greens. And the first publisher didn't love it. They wanted something a little bit bigger. And anyway, fast forward to all the negotiations and the book, you know, the book talks and what we landed on was the system that I've taught for years. It's actually hinted at in my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival. And that is my system, my four step system to learning to grow in the garden. Actually it's a three step system, but I, you know, I sneak in a little fourth one there. But basically it's starting with leaves. So learning how to grow sprouts and microgreens and herbs and salad greens, because those are the simplest things to grow in the garden, and then graduating to root crops, which are still pretty simple. Don't have a need for that many resources, but do take a little bit more time, a little bit more skill as a gardener, and then finishing up with fruiting crops, which are the most complicated, the most time intensive, and need the most of skill from a gardener. So I originally named the book Step by Step Gardening. I had this picture in my mind of a staircase of you learning to grow step by step, learning each skill and building on it. And what we ended up with was a book called Leaves, Roots and Fruit. And then the. What do you call that subtitle or whatever is like Step by Step Guide to Growing in an Organic Kitchen Garden. Signed the book deal and immediately went to work on photographing and writing the book. In 2021, we headed out in the. It wasn't the fall, it was like the end of summer. To one of the gardenary consultants who you're going to hear from later on this season on the podcast, Katie Oglesby in Wisconsin, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She was like an hour away from me, has the most, and I'm not exaggerating, the most gorgeous kitchen garden you've ever seen. And we headed up Eric Kelly, my photographer, we headed up there to spend two days with her in her garden to photograph for the book. And oh my goodness, her garden did not disappoint. She was an in ground gardener before she started as a gardenary consultant and then transitioned. She still has her in ground garden but transition another part of her yard to be all raised beds like gardenary style gardening and she outdid herself. Let's just say that. So we took a bazillion photos I wrote through the end of 2021. We did a fall class for Kitchen Garden Academy and a fall class for Garden consultants and then we headed in to 2022. So beginning of 2022, I knew personally this was a big year for myself and my family. My oldest daughter was about to be a sophomore in high school and. And if you know me, you knew my desire was to get back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is the city where I started gardening over a decade ago. I love the seasons here. I love the people here. I love the entrepreneurship here and the opportunities. And I had been itching and trying to get back here for years. My husband's career had been the one that had pushed us and led us up until that point. All of our moves have been for his work. And he promised me when we moved to Chicago that that would be the last move for his career and the next move would be for mine. And so I really saw 2022 as the last year I could do that for quite some time. Because if you know my family, I've got four kids and they were all born within four and a half years. So my oldest was going to be a sophomore, and then the very next year my son would be a sophomore. And then two years after that, my third would be a sophomore, and two years after that my fourth will be a sophomore. So I was like, if we don't leave now, we will not be moving until after 2030. If you made it this far, I want to thank you so much for coming back to the Grow youw Self podcast with me. And I've got an amazing free resource to help you grow yourself in this new year. It's the gardenary planting calendar. This is a customizable resource that you can use. You're just going to put in two dates into this calendar and then I'm going to do all all the other work for you. As soon as you tell me your key dates, I'm going to show you which dates you need to plant what in your kitchen garden to have it packed and full of delicious nutritious and beautiful food all year long. So this Gardenary planting calendar is yours for free. To grab it, all you've got to do is go to gardenary.com podcast and we'll have that resource right there for you today, download and to start using right away for your own Growing yourself garden in 2024. So I continued to, you know, obviously work with Gardenary and and grow our business and serve our students. But all along I was also trying to get us down to Nashville, Tennessee, which we finally did in June of 2022. So that was a big move for us. Right in the middle of that, we were still doing Kitchen Garden Academy. Had some incredible student wins in that course. And then we also started a membership that we call Gardenary365. And the the mission and the message of Gardenary365 was to encourage people to garden to eat from the garden 365 days out of the year. We're going to touch on this a lot in this season of the Grow youw Self podcast. But the idea of that the garden isn't just for the summer. The garden is something that we should enjoy parts and pieces of in our everyday lives, every day of our life. And so Gardenary365 was really a passion project of mine and a way to help everyone start to see that the garden could be part of their everyday habits, just their everyday routines. Just picking a little, eating a little, planting a little, tending a little. And that was a wonderful initiative to start. And we got to see thousands of students come through the Gardenary 365 membership got to Nashville immediately, tried to figure out how in the world I was going to set up a kitchen garden in the summer in Tennessee and get it going before fall came. We were settling into our new home here in Nashville. I was checking out my yard, which slopes as most yards do here in Nashville, and also has very large trees. So I had lots of what we call lovely limitations to work around. We still made the garden happen. My dad and mom came up for a few weeks to help us get moved in, and I documented the whole thing so you can check it out on Instagram and on the Gardenary blog and see the changes we made. I ended up doing a garden that's about 40ft long and about 25ft wide. And we're going to dive in. I'll talk about the design and the setup and all that. I'm going to break that all down here this season on the podcast as well. So got that garden done and in the middle of that, finished my deadlines for my book, Leaves, Roots and Fruit. We moved into the fall season here in Nashville. My kids started school and we had one of the most spectacular classes of garden coaches come through our program. And again, we did a kitchen garden academy class. For the fall season. I was back in Nashville and relearning the seasons, and it was again, confirmation of the gardenary system that so many of us can plant and enjoy the garden for so much more of the year than we realize. So even being, you know, relatively new to Nashville, I hadn't lived and gardened here since I started gardening in 2010, 2011. But I fell right back into it and, you know, maximizing and making the most of the space and the time. And I had harvests in my garden here in Nashville all the way to the new year. In fact, we had a major freeze at the end of December and I was out there scurrying around, just pulling all kinds of wonderful things like peas and radishes and daikons and arugula and spring mix cabbages, bok choy, so many delicious things. Even like after Christmas, it was so great. So we finally get to 2023, which is, I guess, like that's what constitutes the fact that this has been three years. In my mind, it's only been two. But we settled into Nashville and it was time to build our gardenary team here. So we started hiring and our first hire was Molly. She has joined the team since almost a year ago and it's been huge to have her as part of our team here. She is a videographer and has been such a huge help to me and really helped us at gardenary to reach so many more people with our message primarily through video. We hired some other positions, some administrators, and really started to build out our team here in in the city and started to see the potential of what we can do now that I'm finally settled and back home where I always dreamt I could be. This year has been really big too, because I've gotten to garden with some of my heroes, people that I've watched for years and gotten to go into their gardens and show off what they do, show off them as a gardener, adding the garden to their everyday life, and then also just get to be next to them, putting seeds into the ground. So first I got to garden with Donald Miller. I don't know if you know him. If you don't, you should. He is an author, a best selling author. He wrote books like Blue Like Jazz and then Transitioned to business writing and he has a book I absolutely love called the Story Brand Method and his story Brand and Business Made simple are two of his major works. And I just, I love learning from him about business and story. And I get to now garden with him and his wife Betsy, his beautiful wife Betsy. And they're gorgeous, super fun, hilarious, extremely active, and interested in planting Bean's daughter. So I've gotten to garden with Betsy and Donald, with Ellie Holcomb, who is one of my favorite singer songwriters, J.J. heller, another favorite singer, songwriter, and many more. So I just had the time of my life this year, getting to be in the garden with some of my heroes and getting to show that these people who have, you know, busy careers and big families and lots to do also find it super important to have the garden as part of their everyday. We released the book Leaves, Roots and Fruit in April, which was so much fun. It was amazing to see so many people getting the book into their hands and watching the projects that they created through the spring and the summer of this year. And of course, we've gotten to grow our kitchen garden academy students and garden consultants this year as well. In fact, this has been our biggest year ever for new gardenary consultants. The trends that started in 2020 and 2021 of individuals ready to make a change career wise, ready to be a little bit more or a lot more in charge of their time and their mission in life and their, their finances that we get to observe just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And so this year we have signed up hundreds of new gardeners as garden consultants and we had our first ever in person gardenary summit and here in Nashville. So back in the spring, right around the time my book launched, I got to create this amazing huge kitchen garden for a place called Juniper Green. So Juniper Green is an event space. They host weddings and parties and all kinds of fanfare at this space. And they wanted to have a kitchen garden right at the center of it. So they gave us full rain, full design power over this place and to get to transform it into a beautiful kitchen garden, complete with native plants and pollinators and fruit trees, was incredible. And so I thought, you know, we've made the space, we've got the garden, let's host our own party. And so in November, we invited the gardenary consultants to come for two days for an in person summit. And we pulled it off. It was amazing. We had almost 50 consultants here in attendance. We got to plan out our businesses for the 2024 year. And a lot of these Gardeners have joined since 2020, so it's been a time where it really wasn't possible to see people in person. And it was literally the highlight of my year to get to finally meet people that I previously only knew through a zoom screen. So that was definitely the highlight. Doing the Juniper Green kitchen garden installation and then hosting all of the gardenary consultants, so many of them here in November. And that about brings us to this space and time. It is now the end of 2023 and we are recording and prepping and getting ready to come back for the Grow youw Self podcast right here for the year of 2024. So what's in store? Well, you have got so much to look forward to. We're going to be having long episodes each week as well as really short episodes so that you can listen quickly or long form however you, however it fits your schedule and what you're up to. In that week, we have some amazing conversations that I got to have with gardenary consultants talking about what it's like to grow in their specific area. We have consultants from California all the way to Detroit, Michigan to North Carolina. We basically span the entire country of the US and you're going to get to hear from them, get gardening tips from them, and hear about the businesses that they're growing in their own towns and cities. We're still going to have surprising stories about the foods that we eat. We're going to dive into some things that aren't so public about the foods that we put on our plate. And of course, I'm going to encourage you to try growing your own or to try to find a much better alternative right in your own city or town from a local farmer or csa. Then I'm going to give you some major challenges. We have some super fun projects that I'll teach you how to do on a step by step basis here on the podcast. And I'm going to give you some insights into building a garden coach business as well. So after growing my own business and then watching hundreds actually, we were now over a thousand garden consultants in the gardenary program, I'm going to bring you onto the inside of what it takes to grow a garden consulting business. Just in case you've ever had a little voice in the back of your head that said, hmm, I wonder if I could do that. Well, I'm going to show you how you can take those first steps and we'll have lots of fun challenges and opportunities for you here as well. All right, that about sums it up. I don't know, three years and 30 minutes. Did I? Did I cover it all? No, I did not. But those are some of the highlights. Basically, we've been busy growing, busy getting better and better and busy meeting more and more of you. And I know 2024 is going to be our most phenomenal year yet. And so much of that is going to start right here on the Grow youw Self podcast. So thanks so much for listening. Thanks for coming back or being here for the very first time. This is going to be an incredible year of growing together and I hope that you'll be here along the ride with me. I promise I'll show up for you and I hope you'll show up for me. Now let's get started growing ourselves in 2024. The time is now. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere you love getting your podcast delivered on Apple, podcasts on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resource to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com podcast.